Google’s Crawling System for 404 and 410 Status Codes

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You all encounter many critical as well as trivial errors while dealing with websites and web pages. Loading errors, page not displaying errors, image loading errors etc are all part of it. But, little do we know what these errors, 404 and 410 implies and if Google treats them differently or not.

404 versus 410 refer to an HTTP status code. Usually, when users look for a page, Google sends back a status code to the browser about the page; for example: 200 HTTP response code for a perfect running page, 404 HTTP code if a page is not found and 410 HTTP code if a page is completely and permanently removed and has less chance to appear again.

Sometimes, Google Webmaster treats these errors in a different way but you shouldn’t concern about it. Google Crawling system is robust in nature. There are many reasons for the 404 and 410 errors to occur; pages go missing, sites go down, users mis-configure sites, people block Google by accident and many other cases. So, with Http errors 404 and 401 and 403, Google protects the page for twenty four hours in the crawling system with the thought that the error is not intended or it might be a transient error.

But with 410, Webmaster knows that it is gone presently, hence, Google immediately convert the 410 status code in an error rather than protect it for twenty four hours. Google advises you not to take it seriously, however because sometimes the assumptions might go wrong when caught up with little details.

Therefore, try again and make sure whether the page is really gone or has come alive again. Google crawling system however thrives to bring in suitable contents available to you when the site goes down or is hacked or any other errors happens.